His links with Jacques Goddet, the organiser of the Tour de France, led to a publishing empire that included the daily sports paper, L'Équipe.

On leaving the army he became at 19 secretary to Marc Sangnier, a journalist and politician,[1][n 1] going from there in 1930 to found the OPG, the Office de Publicité Générale, which handled advertising for several Christian-Democrat newspapers.

Amaury was conscripted into the cavalry in 1938 and was awarded the Croix de Guerre,[6] but he was captured when Germany invaded the Ardennes in 1940.

[n 2] Newspapers and magazines which had continued to publish during the Occupation were closed down and their possessions sequestrated by the State at the end of the war.

He was able to show that L'Auto's print works, through its head, Roger Roux,[8] had clandestinely produced news sheets for the Resistance generally and for Amaury in particular.

The government closed it, along with other newspapers, and licensed Le Parisien Libéré and L'Humanité to take over the paper's headquarters in the rue d'Enghien.

[n 3][9] On 1 March 1975, Le Parisien Libéré's management told workers' representatives of a plan to cut 300 jobs, including those of 200 printers,[10] and to print fewer papers.

The unions said they had been given no notice and it led to one of the longest strikes in French newspaper history and to the murder of an innocent man confused with the paper's editor.

The printers stopped work, helped by colleagues elsewhere in the CGT trade union who gave a tenth of their salary to a strike fund.

An anonymous caller told a local radio station: "We have just blasted the home of Cabanes of Le Parisien Libéré."

Bernard Cabanes was unconnected with the dispute; police believed the bomb was intended for the newspaper's editor, another journalist of the same name.

Its editor, Jacques Goddet, had compiled a dossier to show how much his paper had contributed privately to the Resistance even if its public stance had favoured the Germans.

[14][n 4] Goddet was forbidden to use the name L'Auto, judged to give an unfair advantage over rival sports papers.

French law demands that offspring inherit equally and Amaury's son, Philippe, insisted on his share.